DONATE FOR VENMO

CHALLENGE

Our goal was to design an experience for users to send money via the Venmo app to charitable causes. Venmo wants to leverage aspects of social networking in order to encourage donations. Creating a fast, easy, seamless and secure experience was the high-level goal we had in mind throughout the design process.

SOLUTION

Before starting iterations on the solution, we broke apart the Venmo app’s structure and user flows.

The research outcomes, the usage context, and the user flow of Venmo guided us throughout the design process. We revisited these aspects constantly to ensure the validity of our design decisions. We made sure to keep the aesthetics and user flow pattern consistent with Venmo's brand, creating a familiar experience for Venmo users.

OUTCOMES

We designed a donation feature for Venmo that enables users to easily give money to charitable causes they care about. This feature was designed based on market and user research. It solves both business and user problems through providing a secure and fast way to donate to Venmo's trusted charities, at the same time leveraging social aspect of the application.

PROCESS

Meeting with the stakeholders helped us to understand the challenges. With our team, we identified our roles and expectations from the project and crafted the design strategy.

We started the discovery phase immediately. We reviewed the competitors' landscape, conducted market and user research.

Who is our user?

We have conducted in-depth interviews with 6 Venmo users and later have designed a survey to validate our interview findings. This allowed us to understand user needs, pain points, behaviors and attitudes in regards to using Venmo and overall donating to the causes they care about.

Meet our persona, Shawna

Our persona, Shawna, was born based on the research outcomes. We referred to our persona constantly throughout the design process to create empathy in our team and to prioritize and address her goals, needs, and pain points.

WORK PROGRESS

We started sketching out the early concepts focusing on our primary persona and her journey. Throughout the design process we continued iterating based on research outcomes. Continuing with our process we created paper prototypes and later digital wireframes.

sketching task flows and concepts

from paper prototypes to hi-fidelity digital wireframes

ITERATIONS

We conducted 3 rounds of usability testing with 3 users in the 1st two rounds and 5 users in the last round. We iterated the designs twice. Below are two examples of iterations.

we iterated the search function

Based on our usability test results we incorporated the “Search Charities” function with the “Search Friends” function, meanwhile grouping the search results accordingly.

we iterated the quick donation buttons

The quick donation buttons were also iterated in regard to interaction and content. When the quick donation button is tapped, the color changes; it expands in size, and the message changes as well.